I didn’t see this coming.

In his celebrated career as a criminal defense lawyer, Gerald Shargel has represented Mafia bosses, corrupt politicians and celebrities in hot water, while trying more than 125 jury trials along the way.

Now, four decades after hanging out his own shingle, Mr. Shargel has closed the law offices of Gerald L. Shargel L.L.P. and on Monday will announce that he is joining the corporate law firm Winston & Strawn as a partner in its New York office.

One cop, Andrew Blomberg, was acquitted last year in the beating of Chad Holley. Will the same happen for another Houston police officer, Drew Ryser?  A trooper and Texas Ranger took the witness stand in his defense to explain why it should, using a vision and language that only they know.  From the Houston Chron :

Jess Malone, a former state trooper who has assisted in the investigation of more than 100 police misconduct cases, said that Ryser’s hand strikes in the arrest of Holley, then 15, were justifiable given the situation.

Ryser admitted striking Holley during the arrest. However, he denied kicking Holley, saying a move seen in the video was a rugby maneuver called a “stab step.”

Malone testified that while he does not believe Ryser kicked Holley, doing so would also be within the confines of police protocol. “Kicking is perfectly legal,” Malone said. “It may be distasteful, but it’s legal.”

A kick becomes a “stab step.” Either way, perfectly legal.

Malone testified that the arrest scene was “very chaotic” and very risky. When asked by prosecutors if the risk dissipated when Holley was on the ground and being struck, Malone continued to defend the officers’ actions.

“There’s no obvious position of surrender until you are in custody,” the ex-Ranger said. “Anything’s possible.”

Former Texas Ranger Chief Maurice Cook, the second witness called by the defense in Friday’s trial, reiterated the sentiments of his fellow Ranger on the stand.

“(Ryser) did act as a reasonable officer based on the totalitary of circumstances,” Cook said, calling Holley “an active resistor.”

Cook, who teaches law enforcement at Alvin Community College, said Ryser’s strikes to Holley’s head were permissible and identified them as “pain compliance.”

Prosecutor Tommy LaFon showed the arrest video to Malone on the stand and asked whether there was an attempt to arrest Holley before he was struck.

“The first contact that happens with Mr. Holley is several officers putting feet on him,” LaFon said referring to the kicks and knee strikes in the video. “Have you ever seen a police officer handcuff someone with their feet?”

Obviously, LaFon doesn’t understand the language of cops, at least when it comes to Chad Holley. One can’t handcuff someone who hasn’t surrendered, and since there is “no obvious position of surrender,” and anything can happen, the police were left with no choice but to execute cop moves with cool names upon his head and body.

But this all happened three years ago, so you probably don’t recall that Chad Holley was then a 15-year-old being chased for a burglary. He was subsequently convicted of it in juvenile court and sentenced to probation. He had already received the requisite whoopin’. And this is the video of  his arrest.

It would have been bad enough, no, horrible enough, had this just been another utterly needless tragedy of over-armed cops using all their toys to protect themselves first, to accomplish with excess force what they could have easily accomplished safely, that ended in the death of 7-year-old Aiyana Jones in Detroit.

But no, that failed to explain what really happened.  Via CBS Detroit :

Jurors in the trial of a Detroit police officer charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of a 7-year-old girl watched a video Tuesday of the police raid that led to the fatal shooting.

The shot that killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones in 2010 could be heard on the video, which was recorded by a crew from “The First 48,” a reality TV show on A&E Networks. Officer Joseph Weekley’s gun fired and struck the girl in the head while she slept on a couch.

It wasn’t just for the testosterone rush that Weekley carried a submachine gun into the house, but for the cameras.  So you could watch some cool show about the heroic work of law enforcement.  Here’s what you could have seen:



And this is the face of the young human being on the other end of that gunshot.



The family photo is not just one of a lovely little girl, but of an irony that can’t be manufactured. Notice the faces in the background, the Disney characters of beautiful fantasy females that young girls adore? If any one of them had been shot in the head in her sleep during a nighttime police raid, you would be bombarded with news about it. How many have heard of Aiyana? It happened over three years ago, but a dead 7-year-old in Detroit doesn’t get the airplay of a Jodi Arias.  At best, it’s worth A&E, not the networks. Cable has too much time to fill with cheap content.

A witness, Sgt. Robert Malone, explained the process.  Note in particular the language, the heroic police jargon that captures hearts and minds on cable TV shows and makes police officers feel brave, valued and manly.

“Generally when we do entries, there is a lot of yelling. You generally hear a lot of ‘Police, police, police. Get down, get down. Police, police,” but it was a little more frantic than normal. I heard a lot of screaming that wasn’t typical of a normal entry,” he said.

Weekley was the first officer through the door — “the tip of the spear” — assistant prosecutor Rob Moran said in his opening statement to the jury.

“The flash grenade goes off: Boom!” Moran said. “He stands there. This is called the fatal funnel. You never stand in a doorway. Three seconds after the flash grenade detonates, his gun goes off and that’s when the fatal shot is fired.”

The idea behind all this is to disorient the occupants of the house, to cause momentary confusion so they can’t process what’s happening until the police have overwhelmed them with shock and awesomeness.  It looks great on TV, reminding viewer what a spectacular job the police are doing protecting them from the vicious criminals, even if they turn out to be 7-year-old girls, and that they better not screw with the cops or their home could be the next one on camera.

Yet, this scenario ends up with an unanticipated outtake. You see, it was meant to show greatness, and nobody planned on its showing the killing of a child. “Cut,” the director would yell, but there was no stopping reality TV. A dead child was as real as it gets.

Homicide investigator LaTonya Brooks testified that detectives didn’t want the TV crew at the scene. Fishman said police department officials never asked officers if they wanted cameras following them with people asking “dumb questions.”

“That’s additional pressure to doing a pressure-filled, difficult job, wouldn’t you agree?” Fishman said.

“I agree,” Brooks said.

Cameras. Pressure. Dumb questions.

Malone, like Brooks, testified he would have preferred not being “miked up” and having cameras tagging along taping their every move.

“I just know that, again, it’s distracting and it was a serious event that we were getting ready to undertake. So, I disagreed with it 100 percent tactically. I don’t think that we needed distractions,” he said.

When it goes clean, meaning they use all the toys but only kill a dog or two, and not a child, however, they get to play hero on the telly. Gather the family, gather the team, let’s watch ourselves be awesome cops on cable.

Except whether they are “miked up” or not, they are still holding guns in their hands, and those guns have real bullets in them, and they are aimed at real human beings. The type who can die when struck by real bullets from their real guns.  The people holding those guns can’t blame the TV cameras for pulling the trigger. Being on camera doesn’t mean you’re excused for killing people.

The idea that Weekley, who vomited right after realizing that he had just shot a child, was horrified by what he did reflects that the shooting was accidental. He didn’t mean to pull the trigger. Nobody wanted to kill anyone that night. But the problem remains that when you carry a submachine gun on a raid, people sometimes get killed. Sometimes, the person will be a little girl.

While there is plenty of blame for this killing to spread around, from the people who conceived this particular raid to the people who decided that cops need special weapons and tactics so they can rush in with grenades rather than wait out a person under safe and nonviolent conditions, it’s hard to lay blame for Aiyana’s death on the cameras or mikes.

But what the TV crew can be blamed for is their reflection in our sickness at wanting to watch the police do things like this to people, creating a television-worthy show of force.  What remains a question is whether the reality show, had the cameras captured the actual shooting of this beautiful child, would have aired it.

In a post at  PrawfsBlawg that offered insight into the peculiar institution called the legal academy, Harvard lawprof  I. Glenn Cohen offered a laundry list of “to do” and “not to do” for others of his breed to get the holy grail of academia, tenure. Rather than see this as inside baseball, it was twisted a bit to suggest either a reflection of how it works at Harvard, or perhaps Cohen’s personal recommendations, generating some natural anger from those young lawyers who are always naturally angry, and he pulled it down. 

Of course, this being the internet and all, that didn’t work too well. and it lives on in cache, not to mention in except at Keith Lee’s  Associate’s Mind and Paul Caron’s Tax Prof.  Paul provides the listicle:

1. Write less than one paper a year or leave most of your publishing for late in your tenure clock


2. Co-author too much


3. Being too much of a wallflower or being not enough of a wallflower


4. Focus too much on teaching or service


5. Fail to get to know those in your field, fail to be a good PR agent for yourself


6. Undertake projects with timelines incompatible with your tenure clock, including books


7. Focus on the views of your mentors to the exclusion of the views of your faculty as a whole and outside readers

What makes this list particularly curious is that it was controversial to different groups for entirely different reasons. Among the academy standard bearers, it made them look trivial and puny, as if they lacked the intellectual fortitude to handle a new academic that had a thought that was better, bigger, smarter or more important than theirs. 

For the aspiring academic, the message was play nice but not too nice. Be smart but not too smart. Work hard but not too hard. Do nothing controversial to upset the gray beards and blow rainbows up their butts.

But the worst was number 4 on the list, do not focus too much on teaching or service.  Because, you know, why would a teacher want to, you know, be a good teacher.  At a time when law schools are challenged by new lawyers, unable to find work and incapable of safely practicing law, to justify their tuition bills, this really isn’t the sort of advice they want to hear. As Keith Lee points out:

This should make every practicing lawyer very sad and worried for the future of the profession. Here is a law professor – at Harvard – saying that his job stability is better served by not serving his students. The people that we are entrusting to train the next generation of lawyers are being encouraged by their institutions to not focus on students, but instead on papers, projects, and other scholarship that has little to no relevance in the actual law practice.

A law school’s purpose is not prestige, or papers, or books. A law school’s purpose to produce new lawyers. Period.

It’s like he read the law porn and believed it! Kids. You gotta love ’em.

Of course, that’s the purpose of law school from the perspective of some students. Others think it’s a three year opportunity to decide what they want to do with their lives. Still other would be more than happy to be taught little, freeing up their evenings for beer bong, with a sheepskin at the end the makes them a member of the lawyer club, where they get fabulous paycheck and a guaranteed life of prestige and security.  The idea of what constitutes “producing new lawyers” is in flux these days.

This being the interwebz and all, Paul Horwitz posted a sign language interpretation* of Glenn Cohen’s post on  PrawfsBlawg explaining why Cohen was undeserving of opprobrium.

A broader point I have made about tenure here before is that this is supposed to be a profession and a vocation, not just a sweet job. (Although it surely is that.) For all the talk one hears from (some) law professors about speaking truth to power, speaking independently and courageously, and so on, I don’t hear half as much talk about how professors seeking tenure should worry first and foremost about those things, and not about securing tenure. I don’t buy the view–which I see much less of these days, although there are still vocal proponents of it–that anyone capable of getting a job in law teaching could easily switch over into a lucrative job in private practice. That might have been true when one started law teaching, but not by the time one has invested several years in teaching and out of practice. But I doubt the choice is generally between teaching or nothing for most.

Finally, an admission that all lawprofs aren’t so fabulous that they would be kicking sand in David Boies’ face if they actually practiced. The facile justification for some exceptionally comfortable salaries has long been silly, and utterly unproven, though I suspect Paul’s view is still in the minority. After all, it’s easy to believe oneself a brilliant lawyer is one never has to actually be a lawyer, brilliant or otherwise.

But the aspect that generated the most heat from Cohen’s list, the “don’t focus too much on teaching or service” advice, gets some play:

Let’s talk about the “don’t overinvest in teaching or practice” point–which, again, was made in a spirit of realism, not commendation. Some responses, here and elsewhere, suggested that this revealed everything we need to know about law schools and law teaching. I get the reaction, but I think it’s wrong. First, I could imagine similar advice being given across the academy. Second, whatever “overinvesting” in teaching means, the original post suggested–correctly–that most junior law professors do it; and I think he was right that most of us are happy we did so. Your colleagues are not the ones standing in front of a room of students, who have reasonable expectations that you’ll know how to do your job; you are. And you do have an obligation to them. Third, he didn’t recommend underinvesting in teaching, or define what an appropriate investment in teaching is.

The policy of virtually disregarding teaching in employment decisions is acknowledged to be a fairly bad one. Almost no one will defend it straight up (the exceptions being a handful that believe whatever the market produces must be correct.) Changing it isn’t simple or pain-free. Simply paying more lip service to teaching during the process isn’t enough. Real employment outcomes need to depend on it in order for performance in that area to be taken seriously. That means hiring and tenuring some mediocre scholars because of their fantastic teaching abilities, and letting some fantastic scholars go because their teaching is simply not very good.

This last sentence is where it all comes together, for better or worse. If law school was all about teaching students how to become lawyers, an assumption long maintained by students, their parents and practicing lawyers, then the academy would have snub scrubs in favor of those who fit the dual requirements of practical experience and the ability to convey it to students.

Within Glenn Cohen’s list, and Paul Horwitz’s deciphering of it, is the tacit admission that law schools, and particularly their tenured faculties who are charged with upholding, if not improving upon, their prestige within their peer group, exist to protect the turf of scholars at the expense of students. 

Don’t blame Cohen or Horwitz for giving up the academy’s secrets. Don’t blame the academy for wanting to protect its members’ ability to get paid a damn fine salary to do the things that they enjoy.  If you could get away with this, you would too. 

What we can blame the academy for is that in the course of taking law geeks who are unlikely to last a day on trial in the trenches (despite Paul’s argument that the option isn’t lawprof or nothing) and making them wealthy and happy, they have failed to fulfill the core requirement for the existence of the animal known as law school.  And what this kerfluffle shows is that left to their own devices, the legal academy will never recognize or openly concede that they are incapable of teaching students to become lawyers.

For all the dancing around the issues, reducing the length of law school, lowering tuition, adding clinics, and whatever lipstick on a pig solutions the adherents of the future of the law propose, it’s all a distraction from the main event.  If lawprofs can’t teach kids to be practicing lawyers, then it’s three years and a boatload of money wasted.

The scholars won’t change this because this isn’t the life they dreamed of. The students won’t change this because they are both clueless and utterly narcissistic. And the practicing lawyers can’t be bothered even thinking about this, totally absorbed with making a living.  But it will change. It just won’t be fixed.

* Forgive the fact that quotes from Horwitz’s post are veerrrry looooong. He’s a lawprof and he would be shunned for brevity. Even on the internet. It’s very sad.  Even tenured professors don’t want to be shunned.

It’s no surprised that people call them “honey, sweetie, darling” or just “the girls.”  Are they offended by it? Do they laugh at it? It’s unclear, but it appears to push them to show everyone in the courthouse that cute as they might be, they are not to be taken lightly.



Are they as good as they think? Who knows. I certainly hope so. They can’t be faulted for their work ethic if they indeed leave no stone unturned.

Is it hard for two young women to start a criminal defense practice? Of course it is. It has all the problems of two young men, their lack of knowledge and experience, the difficulty in getting clients to trust your skills enough to give you a shot.  But being young females adds an additional dimension to the problems. While the guys, from court officers to clerks to older lawyers, will be happy to help you, that still doesn’t mean they will take you seriously.  That is, until you prove yourself.

The lesson here isn’t just a woman thing, but a young lawyer thing. This is hardly an optimal way to learn how to become a criminal defense lawyer. Whether their self-assessment is accurate, or even anywhere in the ballpark of accurate, can’t be said, especially given that self-assessments are notorious. But they seem to have drive and, with hard work and luck, will make something  of their efforts without causing harm to too many defendants.

It beats the hell out of sitting on the couch in their parents’ basement whining about how they can’t get a job.

The place is in an uproar over news broken by Glenn Greenwald at the  UK Guardian that the NSA has obtained en masse the metadata of American telephone calls.  Millions upon millions of calls, all without suspicion that we’re doing anything wrong. All approved by Judge Roger Vinson sitting as FISA judge.

And the place is in an uproar. Because the reality of what we’ve allowed and approved, even if tacitly, for decades has come to light?  Grow up.

Congress enacted FISA in 1978. The riff raff, like us, didn’t know about its existence until sometime in the 1980s, at which point we pulled our hair out, yelled and screamed, over this outrageous violation of basic principles of freedom, privacy, liberty.  And it was news for a few hours until everybody went back to watching TV and the stock market.

And all was forgotten, because the truth is that we don’t care all that much, our attention span is brief and shiny things are more fascinating to the American public. They always have been.

It’s been extended and expanded since then, including a paradigm shift in how it worked back in 2004, during  the mid-second-Bush years.  The  New York Times wrote about it. The few who were interested knew about it. The rest were busy scrambling to get their new iToys.  Remember that? No, I didn’t think so.

And so we now learn about the government getting it all, and likely far more than Greenwald tells about. And uproar ensures.  Turning to the person who will always offer the finest explanation of why the government knows what it’s doing,  Stewart Baker calmly explains:

The Director of National Intelligence issued a statement late last night about the NSA collection flap.

First, large-scale collections give the government a way to screen for patterns in communications that will bring to light terrorists who are unknown to the government. As the DNI puts it,  ”The collection is broad in scope because more narrow collection would limit our ability to screen for and identify terrorism-related communications. Acquiring this information allows us to make connections related to terrorist activities over time.”

Second, the government justifies collecting a reservoir of data because it is only allowed to consume the data a spoonful at a time.

In short, there’s less difference between this “collection first” program and the usual law enforcement data search than first meets the eye.  In the standard law enforcement search, the government establishes the relevance of its inquiry and is then allowed to collect the data.  In the new collection-first model, the government collects the data and then must establish the relevance of each inquiry before it’s allowed to conduct a search.

If you trust the government to follow the rules, both models end up in much the same place.

The  press release by upstate New York Senator Joe Griffo (R-C-I, Rome) was deeply touching. Maybe “touching” isn’t the right word here.

The New York State Senate today passed a bill that creates the crime of aggravated harassment of a police or peace officer. The bill  (S.2402), sponsored by Senator Joe Griffo (R-C-I, Rome) would make it a felony to harass, annoy, or threaten a police officer while on duty.  

“Our system of laws is established to protect the foundations of our society,” Senator Griffo said. “Police officers who risk their lives every day in our cities and on our highways deserve every possible protection, and those who treat them with disrespect, harass them and create situations that can lead to injuries deserve to pay a price for their actions.”

A felony? Because protecting the foundations of society requires us to treat cops more respectfully? Perhaps they don’t teach civics in the Rome public schools? The only thing surprising about this bill is that Griffo didn’t include state senators as well, since they clearly don’t get much respect.

“At a time when shocking incidents of disrespect and outright confrontation are at an all-time high, the men and women who patrol the streets of our cities deserve every possible protection we can offer them,” Senator Griffo stated.

Apparently, there is an epidemic of disrespect, an all-time high, that no one but Griffo is aware of, causing police officers to feel badly about themselves. If so, I know I’ve certainly contributed to hurting police officers’ feelings on occasion. Now I feel ashamed of myself for saying mean things about the people who deserve every possible protection we can offer them.

“My bill would make it a crime to take any type of physical action to try to intimidate a police officer. This is a necessary action because we can see from the rise in incidents that too many people in our society have lost the respect they need to have for a police officer. We need to make it very clear that when a police officer is performing his duty, every citizen needs to comply and that refusal to comply carries a penalty.”

Aha! So it’s not just hurting feelings, but “physical action to try to intimidate a police officer.” Well, that’s interesting. And by “intimidate,” Griffo means “every citizen needs to comply” when a cop is performing his duty?  This press release appears to present strings of meaningless phrases connected in such a way as to give the appearance of offering something substantive while ultimately saying nothing.

So what does Griffo’s bill, passed by the Senate, provide?

S 240.33 AGGRAVATED HARASSMENT OF A POLICE OFFICER OR PEACE OFFICER.

    A  PERSON  IS  GUILTY  OF AGGRAVATED HARASSMENT OF A POLICE OFFICER OR   PEACE OFFICER WHEN, WITH THE INTENT TO HARASS, ANNOY, THREATEN OR  ALARM   A  PERSON  WHOM HE OR SHE KNOWS OR REASONABLY SHOULD KNOW TO BE A POLICE   OFFICER OR PEACE OFFICER ENGAGED IN THE COURSE  OF PERFORMING HIS OR HER   OFFICIAL DUTIES, HE OR SHE STRIKES, SHOVES, KICKS OR OTHERWISE  SUBJECTS  SUCH PERSON TO PHYSICAL CONTACT.

    AGGRAVATED  HARASSMENT OF A POLICE OFFICER OR PEACE OFFICER IS A CLASS   E FELONY.

Griffo’s nonsensical and meaningless hyperbole aside, the purpose of the bill is to extend the protections of Penal Law §120.08 for an assault on a police officer, a class C felony, requiring the cop to suffer “serious physical injury,” to situations where they suffer no injury at all.  While the meaningless intent language is shared by other offenses, the conduct here applied to anyone who “strikes, shoves, kicks or otherwise subjects” a cop “to physical contact,” which apparently means any touching at all.

While many argue for their right to physically oppose police officers, in the course of performing their “official duties” (note that it doesn’t say lawful duties), when they act either without lawful authority or, more significantly, when they beat the daylights out of someone for no particular reason, this bill would create a felony out of any touching whatsoever. 

It appears that the foundation of Griffo’s rhetoric, that there is some epidemic of harassment of cops that hurts their sensitive feelings, coupled with people touching them, exists only in the minds of those in a large room in Albany.  It certainly isn’t reality on the street, where the worst of the harassment is the blood people’s heads leave on the ends of batons, or the damage people to do taser darts with their rock-hard bodies.  In other words, this is a cure for non-existent problem.

But far, far worse is the potential for abuse. At least where evidence of an actual physical injury is required, an officer can’t claim a “touching” that leaves no proof of it ever happening, even though an injury fails to explain who did what to whom.  At least there’s evidence that something happened here. With this bill, there need be no evidence but for the officer’s word.  What could possibly go wrong?

The message this sends is similarly alarming. Are Griffo and his senatorial cohorts seriously contending that the heart and soul of society is to comply with police officers?  Did he get his words backwards, and maybe mean to say that cops are public servants who must be compelled to respect the constitutional rights and physical integrity of the public?  Sadly, I’m pretty sure he meant what he said, inane as it may be.

Does this mean that a person who taps a police officer on the shoulder to ask for directions, thus annoying the cop who is carefully focusing his attention on the new donuts being laid out on the racks of Dunkin’ has committed a felony?  Well, potentially yes, but it’s not likely the way the law will be used. Rather, this would be more likely akin to resisting arrest, a weapon in the cops’ arsenal to ensure compliance upon pain of a felony charge. 

It will take all of five minutes for a few magic words to find their way into an accusatory instrument to teach people that inadequate compliance with a cop means they’re in for a much harsher ride.  But what of the touching, you ask?  Well, it’s really not much of a stretch to toss in some language like “and the defendant subjected the officer to physical contact by touching his hand to the officer’s body.” Prove it didn’t happen?

Just nuts.  Let’s see whether the legislature sees a similar epidemic to soothe the cops’ delicate sensibilities.

H/T @Boatfloating

It’s not my norm to post press releases, but the following release from a new advocacy group called Blind Justice* is worth mention mostly because they put their money where their hearts and minds are.

CAMPAIGN EXPOSING PERILS OF PROSECUTOR MISCONDUCT TO HIT MANHATTAN TELEVISION AND TIMES SQUARE

Blind Justice Launches Ad Campaign to Alert New Yorkers to the Dangers of Unchecked Prosecutors and Urge Cy Vance to Hold His Prosecutors Accountable

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 5, 2013) – Blind Justice, the national nonprofit advocate dedicated to conviction integrity, today announced the launch of a Manhattan focused ad campaign bringing to light the damages caused by unchecked prosecutorial misconduct and calling for accountability in an effort to prevent future wrongful convictions. The new campaign will kick-off today with a series of television ads highlighting real cases of prosecutor misconduct and a 10-second feature ad on the CBS Super Screen in Times Square.
 

 

The television ad series titled “Conviction at Any Cost” will air on multiple networks in the Manhattan area and are available to view at www.blind-justice.org.

Each ad features transcript statements from a deposition of New York County prosecutor, Bureau Chief Kerry O’Connell who withheld witness testimony, hid key evidence and failed to disclose third-party confessions that could have proven the innocence of the wrongfully convicted at the time of the trial in the case featured. 

 

“Every government official needs oversight, especially those powerful enough to put an innocent man behind bars. The Manhattan district attorney can no longer turn a blind eye to the pattern of prosecutor misconduct in New York City courts. Prosecutors that are powerful enough to send an innocent man to prison for life must be held accountable,” says Torin Kelly, Executive Director of Blind Justice.

 

The “Conviction at Any Cost” television ads will air alongside a series of 10-second ads running once an hour, 18 times a day through the end of September, in one of the world’s most famous advertising venues – Times Square.  

 

“Times Square is the perfect venue to launch our ad campaign demonstrating that ‘win-at-all-costs’ prosecutors are a dangerous problem in Manhattan that can no longer be ignored by elected leaders who campaigned on conviction integrity,” concluded Kelly.

 

The new ad campaign in the Manhattan area follows the 501(c)(4) social welfare organization’s national launch last month that included television ads calling for prosecutor accountability in Brooklyn, N.Y. and Houston, Texas.

This is the television ad that will start airing in Manhattan:

Say what you will, but they are spreading their word about prosecutorial responsibility. Who doesn’t want prosecutors to be responsible for their actions? And if courts and bar disciplinary authorities won’t act, then why not Blind Justice?

Whether this will be effective in getting the public to recognize and understand the problem of prosecutorial misconduct, and perhaps even come to understand why it’s a problem in need of address, has yet to be seen, but you can’t blame Blind Justice for trying.

* We walked in, sat down, Obie came in with the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, sat down. Man came in said, “All rise.” We all stood up, and Obie stood up with the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures, and the judge walked in sat down with a seeing eye dog, and he sat down, we sat down. Obie looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing eye dog. And then at twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry, ’cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn’t nothing he could do about it…

From all accounts, Sean Thomas had a  pretty good cause of action against three New York City cops for excessive force.

When Sean Thomas sued three New York City police officers in 2009, claiming they had used excessive force against him, he appeared to have a strong case. After his arrest the previous year during a dispute with his girlfriend at her home in the Bronx, he was handcuffed, wrapped in a restraint blanket, strapped to a stretcher and taken to the hospital where he was involuntarily sedated, according to court documents. He was never charged with any crime.

On Nov. 19, 2012, less than a month after the damages were awarded, David Zelman, one of Mr. Thomas’s lawyers, sent a letter to Judge Carter, telling him that he had recently learned of the agreement.

[I]n an order released on Tuesday, a judge threw out the verdict and ordered a new trial. It seems that just days before Ms. Marrow had appeared in court, Mr. Thomas signed a written agreement promising to give her 20 percent of any damages he received if she testified on his behalf.

Under New York law, it is not permitted to pay a witness in exchange for favorable testimony, Judge Carter wrote. The agreement was signed and notarized on June 30, 2012, three days before Ms. Marrow testified and backed up Mr. Thomas’s version of the events.

“She said, ‘If you don’t sign this, I’m not going to court,’ ” Mr. Thomas said, according to court documents.

In a powerful post,  Jeff Gamso quotes from a 1999 dissent by the late Chief Justice of Ohio, Tom Moyer in the sadly appropriately named State v. Fears :

Time and time again this court has commented on the impropriety of a prosecutor’s argument throughout the course of a capital case. Time and time again we have given prosecutors the benefit of the doubt, declaring their conduct to be nonprejudicial in view of overwhelming evidence of guilt.
However, despite our best efforts to clarify the limits of acceptable advocacy, and our stern warnings to avoid such inappropriate conduct in the future, some prosecutors continue to unabashedly cross the line of vigorous but proper advocacy. In doing so, they taint the fairness of our criminal justice system.

Ohio’s late Chief Justice, Tom Moyer, wrote that in 1999.  Admonition without consequence.  Threats without substance.  Next time.  One of these days.  Just wait.  

The onslaught of litigation brought by “patent trolls” — who typically buy up a slew of patents, then sue anyone and everyone who might be using or selling the claimed inventions — has slowed the development of new products, increased costs for businesses and consumers, and clogged our judicial system.

Their business plan is simple: trolls (intellectual-property lawyers use less evocative terms like “non-practicing entities” and “patent-assertion entities”) make money by threatening companies with expensive lawsuits and then using that cudgel, rather than the merits of a case, to extract a financial settlement. In the apt summary of President Obama, who on Tuesday announced a plan to stave off frivolous patent litigation, trolls just want to “ hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money .”

Lost in the debate, however, is that judges already have the authority to curtail these practices: they can make trolls pay for abusive litigation.

Section 285 of the Patent Act, as well as Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, give judges the authority they need to shift the cost burden of litigation abuse from the defendant to the troll. But remarkably, judges don’t do so very often: by our count , fees were shifted under Section 285 in only 20 out of nearly 3,000 patent cases filed in 2011.